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EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure
solutions, became the first enterprise storage vendor to integrate
flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) into its core product
portfolio. Solid state flash drives utilize flash memory to store
and retrieve data, yielding response times that are an order of
magnitude faster than the fastest hard disk drives and require
dramatically less power to run. The EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 storage
system is the only enterprise storage system available on the market
today to leverage this technology, which has been tested by EMC for
the past year, to deliver ultra-high performance for
mission-critical applications.
The flash drives for the Symmetrix DMX-4 system
have been purpose built to EMC's exacting specifications and use
single-layer cell (SLC) flash technology combined with sophisticated
controllers to achieve ultra fast read/write performance, high
reliability and data integrity. They have been tested and
qualified to withstand the intense workloads of high-end enterprise
storage applications. Continuing a pace of innovation that has
made Symmetrix the market-leading enterprise storage platform for
more than a decade, EMC has further optimized the Symmetrix DMX-4
operating software to take advantage of the full power and value
that flash storage technology brings to high-performance storage
environments, including the ability to easily provision, manage,
replicate and move data between flash drives and traditional Fibre
Channel and SATA disk drives in the same array.
Because there are no mechanical components in
flash drives, they require less power. In a storage
array, flash drives can store a terabyte of data using 38 percent
less energy than traditional mechanical disk drives. It would take
30 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel disk drives to deliver the same
performance as a single flash drive, which translates into a
dramatic 98 percent reduction in power consumption in a
transaction-per-second comparison.
"EMC is the first enterprise infrastructure
player to incorporate flash disk into their arrays, which should
give them a huge performance advantage at the very sector of the
market that always seems to need more and more," said Steve
Duplessie, Senior Analyst, The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc.
"If it creates as big a gap in real life transaction processing
shops as it does on paper, this could very well be one of those
killer advantages that only appear every 10 to 15 years."
Flash storage technology is ideally suited to
support applications that need to process massive amounts of
information very quickly, such as currency exchange and electronic
trading systems, real-time data feed processing, mainframe
transaction processing, and many others. Storage systems with
enterprise-class flash drives can deliver single-millisecond
application response times, up to 10 times faster than those with
traditional 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel disk drives. With flash
drive technology in a Symmetrix DMX-4 storage system, a credit card
provider, for example, could process its fraud detection information
more quickly, clearing up to six times more transactions in the same
amount of time it took to previously process a single transaction.
This new solid-state storage tier,
"tier zero," is fully supported by the Symmetrix
software management suite, enabling storage administrators to
simplify the provisioning of all of their storage tiers with
advanced management tools including Dynamic Cache Partitioning,
Virtual LUNs, Quality of Service Manager, and now Virtual
Provisioning (see separate press release for details) to simplify
overall management and application performance.
With new support for one terabyte SATA II disk
drives on Symmetrix DMX-4 systems, EMC is further improving storage
density while enhancing energy efficiency (see separate press
release for details). The Symmetrix DMX-4, with support for flash
drives, Fibre Channel disk drives and SATA disk drives, offers the
broadest range of 'in the box' storage tiering options to enable the
consolidation of all application tiers within a single system. By
aligning data availability, service level requirements and software
functionality with capacity and cost considerations through tiered
storage, Symmetrix DMX-4 delivers the best performance, resiliency
and energy efficiency available in the industry today.
"For years, magnetic disk drive technology
has defined performance boundaries for customers' mission critical
storage environments," said David Donatelli, President, EMC
Storage Division. "With this announcement, EMC has again
revolutionized the storage industry. The introduction of flash
drive technology builds on EMC's long history of storage industry
firsts, including the pioneering use of small form factor disk
drives and ATA disk drives in enterprise storage systems. Then as
now, EMC is helping customers gain a competitive advantage and
tackle information challenges that no other vendor's technology
can."
-- Tech Times Online
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